Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide:  Money, Part One

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

As you could probably tell if you’ve been reading this Guide since I started it, I’ve been putting off this topic.  I’ve been putting it off for several reasons.  Money is a difficult topic to discuss.   Most people don’t want to think about it.  Most of us don’t know how to discuss it.  Most of us consider financial information private—even more private than our sex lives (and you know how you are, you TMI people, you).

And yet money is probably the most important topic of all for freelancers.

Because money—the lack of it or, oddly enough, an abundance of it—is the primary reason most freelance businesses fail.

I am going to spend at least two more posts on financial issues, maybe three, depending on what I need to discuss.

This is a preliminary post, mostly to get you thinking about your own financial preconceptions.

Consider this:  In the United States, we insist on remedial skills for our children.  At minimum, we want them to read at a high school level, to do basic algebra, and to write well enough to communicate their thoughts.  They often don’t achieve these minimums, which is why every president in my lifetime has had some proposal for “fixing” education.

No matter how education is fixed—and each generation has things it must put up with from its elders—it always fails in one big important area.

American public schools do not teach money management.  Some private schools do.  Colleges occasionally do in their business schools.  But oddly, I think, most colleges expect the business majors to have basic  money management skills—and most of them do not.

Whenever Dean and I teach the Master Class, a class designed for professional writers who have plateaued in their careers, we begin with a financial quiz.  We want to make certain that we use terms everyone understands.

The classes, composed of already established professionals, have an average age of 40.  The quiz has ten questions—basic questions such as “define net worth” and “explain cash flow.” 

Most of the students fail.  They get one or two questions right, and that’s it.

One or two. 

These are fully functional adults, many with day jobs.   Most have children.  Most have lived away from their parents and have managed their own finances since they were eighteen years old.

The public school’s original rationale for failing to teach money management was that kids should learn how to handle money at home.  Some kids do.  Some get allowances to buy what they want, and when the money’s gone, it’s gone.  Some learn how to save, either with an account or with a piggy bank.  Some (if Kiplinger’s is to be believed) even manage their own stock portfolios—or did, before the debacle last fall.

Most of us, however, got haphazard money management training at home.  My ex-husband, for example, got an allowance. But when it ran out, his mother would just hand him a $20 to cover whatever he needed.  By the time I met him, he didn’t realize that money was a finite commodity.

Even with that problem, however, he was better off than I was.  My parents never discussed money.  They encouraged fiscal responsibility, since they were both products of the Depression, and I do remember the day my mother took me to the bank to open my own savings account.

But when the school sent home a form for family information, my father refused to fill out the money sections.  He wouldn’t tell anyone what he earned. One of my grade school teachers made me bring the form back to my father and ask him again to fill it out.

My father scrawled “None of your damned business” across the form, and handed it back to me.  I didn’t find out what the man earned until he died, and my siblings and I made certain my mother had enough money to live on.  She had more than enough—she was happy to tell us how much—and I was a bit stunned.

By the time I was thirty, I was out-earning my father.  I had always thought my parents rich.  My friends thought them rich.  My parents just pretended very, very well.

(The reason we didn’t have a second home at the lake like my wealthier friends [my mother told me when I asked] was because we didn’t want one, not because we couldn’t afford one.  In fact, I never once heard my parents say that we couldn’t afford something.  My parents left me with the impression that we could afford everything.  We just didn’t want very much.)

Our perceptions about money—what we learned from our parents, our grandparents, our friends, and the world around us—have an impact on how we handle money.  Most of us just do what we were taught.  We work 9 to 5, have a “secure” job, and pay our bills on time.  If we have investments, we hire someone to take care of them for us because (we were taught) it takes specialized knowledge to handle money.

Money management has become an arcane science in American society.  We all get by, but only a few hold the keys to the kingdom.

We’ve seen, in the last six months, what giving the keys to that very important kingdom to people with specialized knowledge brings.  It brings economic ruin and chaos.

I’m smart about money.  I still make mistakes (jeez, do I), but I’m a very, very good money manager.  If I’m not paying attention, I’ll tell you I was always this way.

But I wasn’t.

I learned about money from the school of hard, hard, hard knocks.

Let me give you a few examples.

I married the first time at nineteen.  I had never lived on my own.  You’ve already heard about my parents’ magical approach to money.  I spent my eighteenth year in a private college on a full scholarship—one that paid for room, board, expenses, and tuition.  I didn’t want for anything that year.

I gave it all up for love.  So romantic.  (So dumb.  My favorite prof said, “Marry him after you graduate.”  My divorced older sister said, “If you want to sleep with him, sleep with him, for god’s sake.  You don’t need to be married for that.”  In my nineteen-year-old wisdom, I thought she was being cynical.  I thought my professor was “liberal.”  If only I had listened….)

The minister who performed the ceremony gave all of the starry-eyed young couples a questionnaire of his own devising.  It went on for pages, and tried to ferret out compatibility.

He called us into his office in two months before the ceremony, and said he had never seen such a compatible couple.  Our answers matched on 80% of the questions.

The only area we didn’t match on at all was money.  We disagreed on every single question.

He said, gently, that this could be a serious problem in the relationship, and we might want to rethink the marriage.  He thought some counseling on financial issues would be in order before we said I do.

We disagreed with him.

We married two months later.

We divorced seven years later.

The main area of contention?  Money.  Not that we fought.  We didn’t.  We just mismanaged our way into marital hell.

But the first steps in my financial education came in those years.  For example, I was raised traditionally.  I was taught that the man handled the financial affairs in the family, so my new husband handled the money.  Until two years in, when we started bouncing checks.  I learned that my ex balanced the checkbook “in his head.”  He never wrote anything down.

I spent Christmas through New Year’s that year, going over each and every bank statement, and balancing them by hand.  I’m dyslexic.  Sometimes it took me four and five hours per statement, and I had 24 of them to go over.

I couldn’t find $200.  It had completely vanished.  So on the first banking day of the new year, I went to the bank with all my statements, and explained my problem.

The bank president took me aside (scaring the crap out of me) and offered to put the $200 back into my account.  It turned out that an employee had embezzled from every mismanaged account she could find (ours being one of them), and the bank was reimbursing to avoid the information being made public.  I had to sign a confidentiality agreement.

I could’ve blown the whistle on the whole deal.  There would’ve been court cases and arrests and lots of publicity.

I didn’t blow any whistle.  I signed the agreement. We needed that $200.

Lesson 1:  If you want your money handled well, do it yourself

Lesson 2:  People with fiduciary responsibility embezzle.  I was shocked.  Shocked!

[Note: this would not be the last time that someone embezzled from me.  Sometimes you need to be hit over the head a few times before the lesson sinks in.]

Lesson 3:  Desperate people can be bought off.

I became tight with money.  I had leaks, though.  I bought books as if I was wealthy.  I ate out even when I was broke.  I had to learn to budget for those things. More on that later.

As for my ex, we remained married for another five years.  During that time we started and lost a business because we didn’t know how to handle money (more on that later too).  After that, we borrowed $500 from my parents so that my ex could take a class on finances.  The class taught him to be a financial adviser.

The B student who never graduated from college.  The man who balanced the checkbook in his head.  That man took a two-week course at a hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so that he could work for a financial services firm, giving people financial advice and selling them securities.

I was appalled.  I still am.  My ex was (and probably still is) a good man.  He had a great heart and really wanted to help people.  He was also a great salesman. 

But in those days, he was the last person to give anyone financial advice.

To his credit, he knew it.  He read everything he could about finances and he bought one of the first computer games, one that simulated the stock market.  We learned from that game how risky stock investments were.

Unlike most couples with one spouse working at the financial services firm, we didn’t buy any of the securities my ex sold.  We knew we didn’t understand them well enough.

Lesson 4: The “experts” might know less about finances than you do.

In those years, as I realized I knew nothing about money at all, I did what I always do.  I researched it.  I became a business reporter because I could go to “experts” and ask them money questions—and get paid for it.

For nearly five years, I wrote articles on movers, shakers, and financial whiz kids for publications from In Business to Entrepreneur.  I did not write financial advice columns.  I didn’t feel comfortable advising people about something I barely understood.  I was attempting to get my own financial education, one expert at a time, and I was managing to get paid for it.

At the time, I did not make the connection between the experts I interviewed and my ex-husband, the financial services expert.  I figured the experts I interviewed knew more about money than me and my ex.

Now I wonder exactly how much smoke got blown up my ass in those years.  Still, my financial education was (finally) beginning.

I do owe my ex and his money management skills a great debt, however.  He found two thousand dollars in scholarships and other donations to get me to Clarion Writers Workshop in 1985, and I will be forever grateful.

At Clarion, Joe and Gay Haldeman gave a three-hour lecture on money and business.  In my six weeks at Clarion, those three hours were the only mention of the one thing that makes or breaks a writer’s career.   Joe and Gay filled those three hours with great advice.  They had a long list of dos and don’ts. 

I took copious notes.  I listened attentively.

Then, in the next few years, I proceeded to do every single financial thing that they said to avoid.

The one I remember the most:  Don’t pay your bills with your credit cards in anticipation of a big check.  Gay said that, and she may have actually shaken a finger at us as she did so.  I do remember the serious frown on her face as she spoke.

Because…five years later, I paid bills with my credit card in anticipation of a big check.  And when I found myself in serious financial hot water because of it, that frown on Gay’s face came back to me.

Over and over and over again.

I wasn’t being perverse.  I wasn’t trying to prove Joe and Gay wrong.  I wasn’t trying to ignore their advice.

The problem is that you can tell someone not to do something, and they will remember that advice.  After they’ve made the mistake themselves.

Dean and I relearned that lesson when we taught the first Master Class in 1999.  We told students not to make the same mistakes we did.  We delineated what those mistakes were.  In the intervening years, each student told us that they made those mistakes, and wished they had listened to us, just like I wished I had listened to Joe and Gay.

Dean and I tried to figure out how to give students actual experience with these problems without having the real-life consequences. Subsequent Master Classes have had a role-playing game that we call (unoriginally) the Game, designed to mimic the business conditions of a freelance life.  Dean, Loren Coleman, and I designed it.  Loren, a well known writer who also owns Catalyst Games, made it work.  (He’s our assistant at the Master Class; we couldn’t do it without him.)

Now students tell us they wished they’d listened, but they do so far less.  More often they tell us the mistakes they avoided because they “made” those mistakes at the Master Class.

I wish I could find a way to have all of you make the mistakes in a pretend environment.  Because I know so many of you will read these next few posts, all on money and finances, and then remember the lessons after you’ve made the mistakes.

The only thing I can tell you is this:  We learn by making mistakes.

I would not be good with money if I hadn’t had the experiences listed above.  And some others that I will discuss.  Two failed businesses, several successful businesses.  Living below the poverty line for two years straight and yet somehow managing to survive.  Living well above the poverty line and not being able to pay my bills for the first time in my life.

Learning that making money was only the first step.  Financial success did not mean, as a Clarion friend of mine once said, “becoming rich and never having to work again.”  It meant learning how to live within my means—and figuring out what those means really were.

Learning about cash flow, and liquidity, and the difference between investment and savings.  Learning how to differentiate uncertainty and risk.  Learning how to illusive security really and truly is.

Some of this came through life lessons.  Some through reading.  Some through watching and avoiding the mistakes of others.

I wish I had a copy of that quiz the minister gave me and my ex-husband.  I’d post it here right now.  Because you and your significant other, the person who will live or who is living this freelance life with you, need to take a quiz just like it.

If you haven’t already figured out your differences about money management, you need to learn it.  You need to figure out your own hidden preconceptions about finances.  You need to learn exactly what you believe about money and what your significant other believes.

You also need to figure out—and this is extremely important—what your financial end game is.

Would you be happy making $100,000 year in and year out?  $50,000?  $500,000?

Or is there no dollar limit on your happiness?  Is your financial end game tied to things instead—a paid-off house, a car you own, enough money to send the kids to college, and enough to maintain a comfortable (by your definition) lifestyle.

Or do you want a 24,000 square foot house like Dean Koontz just built?  http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2009-06-08-dean-koontz-cover_N.htm

Money doesn’t buy happiness, but money can get in the way of happiness.  You need to figure out all of this stuff, preferably before you go freelance.  But if you’re one of my readers who already freelances, then you should stop and figure out what your financial desires are.

Because they motivate you.

Let me give you one more personal example.  In 1985, at Clarion, I would have agreed with my friend:  I wanted to be rich and never have to work again.

Now I know that if I were filthy rich (J.K. Rowling rich), I would still work.  I can’t not work.  I love what I do, and I’d do it even if I never had to make another dime.  I’d be like Nora Roberts, writing several books a year, whether my fans wanted to read them or not.

Several of my friends would quit work if they achieved their financial dreams.  They’d manage their money or tour the world or spend time with their grandchildren, like one of my favorite romance writers, LaVyrle Spencer, who retired in her sixties to spend her remaining years with her family.

You need to figure out what you want out of life, out of your freelancing, and out of your finances.  That’s the first step in this money discussion.

Figure it out by next week.  And then we’ll talk some more.

Speaking of money, I decided in April to post the Guide on my blog instead of going through traditional publishing venues.  Since I’m a businesswoman who doesn’t write for free, I have added the donation button at the bottom of each post, hoping that those of you who can afford it will pay for the Guide as if you had bought it in book form at your favorite bookstore.  No matter what you decide about the donation button, please do forward this to others who would be interested.  And if you have comments or questions, please post them below.  I do read them all.  Thanks.

I’m not the only one who saw the blog posts by the inventor of the cat camera.  These folks in Seattle have had their cat wear a camera for a year now.  So I write a story, and their cat takes great pix.  I hope that the cat never finds a dead body in a swamp.  Check it out here:  http://www.photographercat.com/

I have a guest blog on the Novelists Inc. website titled Why Freelance?  You can find it here.

While you’re there, check around the site. There’s lots of good information on the site.

My newest column in The Internet Review of Science Fiction has just appeared.  This one is on social networking and other internet stuff.  Controversial?  You decide.  The column can be found at http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10556

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide:  Discipline

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I don’t want to write this post.  I have half a dozen reasons—some of them very good—as to why.  First, my chronic illness has flared this week, so I’m struggling against my health.  Second, Thursday is one of my annual days off, and I usually post the Guide on Thursday.  If I were working a regular job, this day off would be on my calendar—and would have been since before I was hired. Third, I am moving my office and it looks like this week is D-Day for the desk, computer, printer, and calendar, the very things I use to write 95% of the time.

Those are the good reasons.  Here are the whiney reasons:  First, my office cat died two weeks ago.  I really don’t like going into my office when she’s not there.  Second, I gave up my non-fiction career for a reason twenty-three years ago.  I don’t like writing nonfiction.  It’s work.  Fiction, on the other hand, is fun.  Third, I’ve been doing this Guide for a while now and it’s no longer new (or as my husband would say, it’s not bright and shiny), so it’s become a chore—something with a deadline that must be met, instead of something I look forward to doing.

I might admit the whiney reasons to friends. But here are the final reasons, the ones that come up when I’m tired and not feeling well, like today.  First, I’d rather be reading.  (Honestly, I’d always rather be reading.) Second, I want cake.  (That’s Thursday.)  Third, I want to watch the news.  And get e-mail.  And go on Twitter. And surf the net.  And, and, and….

I don’t want to be sitting in my empty office, groggy from a nap that only left me feeling marginally better, writing part of a book that isn’t under contract and might never be.

So why am I here?

Because I anticipated this day.  Seriously.  I knew this day was coming.  And I planned for it.

Here’s why I’m sitting in my empty office, groggy from a nap that left me feeling only marginally better, writing part of a book that isn’t under contract.

You.

I have met my deadline on the Freelancer’s Guide every week since April second.  I post, you make comments and e-mail me. Some of you have donated to the Guide, and some of you have subscribed, so I have a very real obligation to hit the mark, week after week, until this project is done.

That’s the main reason.  In fact, that’s the only reason I’m here this week.

That reason negates all the complaints I had in the first paragraph.

But the complaints in the second—the ones I call the whiney reasons—have come up before.  And despite the fact that two of them sound project-specific, they’re not.  They come up, with different rationales, with every single project I work on.

I would always rather start a new project than work through the middle of another project.  And the Freelancer’s Guide is in the muddy middle.  How far into the middle, I can’t tell you.  I can never estimate easily how much material I have left.

And honestly, some of that depends on you.  The questions are getting fewer and farther between.  Either I’m answering them or you haven’t thought of them yet. But the more questions I get, the longer the Guide will be.

Finally, I love beginnings.  Not the actual moment of work, which can be hard as I try to figure out how to approach the project, but grooming the idea and preparing it for the actual writing.  That bright and shiny part of writing is appealing to me, and I always have more than one project going just to keep that bright and shiny part of my brain occupied.

I work well at the end of a project as well. Gone are the days when I’d just skip the end (I got tired of Dean looking at me and saying, “You skipped the last 10,000 words again”).   When I know how something will end, I want it finished, and I work harder to get it done so that I can move onto the bright and shiny new thing.

I’m not anywhere close to that on the Freelancer’s Guide.

Then there’s the daily battle against “I want to read” and “I want to eat” and “I want to see a movie/news/TV.”  The battle against “I want to be doing something else, something that sounds fun, because right now, this project isn’t fun.”

Or as I usually say to someone who complains on television (and dammit, they can’t hear me), “Wah.”

Discipline gets a freelancer past all the complaints, but it’s not the discipline you imagine from all those movies about military school or from watching Tiger Woods interviews about his dogged determination to be the first on the course and the last to leave.

Discipline gets the job done, as Malcolm Gladwell noted in his controversial book, Outliers.  The musicians who put in more practice hours have more success than those who put in fewer hours.  Same with athletes, and same with writers and almost everyone else in the arts.  Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama spent more time on the campaign trail in their initial successful Presidential bid than any of their opponents did—both in hours per day, and days per week.

But how did they do that?  How do some musicians, playing the same instrument with the same intensity as other musicians, manage to hit the practice room more often?  Why does Tiger Woods work harder than every other professional golfer on the course—especially since he says, quite frankly, that it’s the hours of practice that make him the golfer he is.

Let’s stick with Tiger for a moment.  My husband used to be a professional golfer, so golf is important to our household, and Dean has more insight than most about the sport.  We’ve watched Tiger since he won the U.S. Amateur competition in the 1990s.  Dean told me then that this kid would be a phenom, and he is.

More than a decade later, Tiger Woods can rest on his laurels, but he doesn’t.  He won the U.S. Open last year, playing for four days with a destroyed knee and a cracked bone.  Golf days last six hours or so, and golf, for those of you who don’t play or follow the sport, hurts knees more than any other part of the body because of an unnatural twisting motion that the golfer must make when he swings.

It takes discipline to go to that course every day, in extreme pain, but you see it not just in Tiger Woods, but in most athletes at the pro level.  It’s so bad in most professional sports that teams have doctors on stand-by to order a badly injured player off the court/field so that the injury will not become permanent and career ending.

What causes this attitude?  Sportscasters call that “heart,” but it’s more than heart.  We’ve all seen high school players with heart, players who will give their all when the time comes to win the big game.

But it’s not the big game that matters.  It’s the practice.  It’s sitting down to play scales for the 50,000^th time because you need to warm up your hands before getting to Mozart.   It’s the drudgery of the same thing every day, with no defined ending.

It’s the ability to overcome the urge to grab the bright and shiny and interesting to finish what you’ve started.

It’s—and I’m sorry to say this, folks—it’s what gets you to your day job five days per week, fifty-two weeks per year.

The problem is that most people don’t apply that same discipline to their freelance work.  There are reasons for this, which I’ll get to.  And, before the comments come in, let me add that I do realize that most people at a day job are not working at their best.  Maybe they never do as well as they could.  Many never reach their full potential.  Most don’t even try.

So what is it that makes some people work hard at their freelance careers while others work hard enough to get by or can’t figure out a way to work at all?

It’s not discipline.  It’s figuring out how to get yourself to work.

Seriously.  What gets most people to their day jobs isn’t the job.  It’s the money they get from the job, money that lets them pay the bills and support their family.  Sure, a handful like their work, but most like the paycheck and benefits better.

Here’s the problem:  there are no paychecks and benefits when you work for yourself.  If that’s your motivation for working, then you’re not going to have much luck freelancing—providing you carry that motivation into your freelance work.

Let’s boil it down a bit more.  When you begin freelancing, you do it for the love.  Often you wait for the muse or until you get an order or if a friend asks for your help with something that you’re good at.  Eventually, you make some money at this, and then you realize you might be able to make a living at it.

Already bad habits have formed.  You start doing this as a hobby, after everything else of importance gets finished.  It feels natural to do the freelance work last. 

Other things are always important.  Your daughter skins her knee, the phone rings, a friend needs help moving.  You have to learn to make your hobby or the thing you did only when you “had time” become your first priority.

How do you do that?

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you.  What you need to do is specific to you. There is no magic bullet, no one-size-fits-all answer.

But let me give you some ideas, based on my own experience.

And as I typed those words, I heard my writing friends giggle.  They are all convinced that I’m the most disciplined person they know.  They’re wrong.  In most things, I lack discipline entirely.

Unlike most of my writing friends, I have not held a full-time job for years. Why? Discipline.  At some point, the paycheck isn’t enough for me.  I hate having someone tell me what to do, and that always triumphs.

Even the radio job which I loved didn’t last long.  I quit four separate times.  Each time the station hired me to be interim news director at my insistence.  I didn’t want the permanent job.  So I stayed until someone new came on board, and came back as interim director when that someone new left.  I remained at the station in between as a volunteer, working a few nights per week.  But I didn’t want to be an employee there.  The only thing that broke that years-long cycle, by the way, was my move out of town.

Discipline has always been a major issue for me.  I get bored easily, and I don’t play well with others.  So hiring a personal trainer, for example, would never work for me.  I would do my best to circumvent anything the trainer told me.

In my forties, I had a piano teacher.  I stayed until I learned how to play the instrument adequately. Then I realized I was seeing how much practice it actually took to convince the teacher I had spent days at it instead of an hour or two.  Once I fooled her a few times, we were done.

This is why I never became a musician.  I didn’t have the discipline.  And I love music.  At one point in my life, I played 15 different instruments.  (Only two of them really well.)  I just don’t  love music enough to conquer my discipline problem.

I love writing enough to work through each issue as it comes up.  How?  By figuring out what stopped me from getting a day’s worth of work involved.

Each time I solved one issue, another cropped up.   Then I would have to solve that one.  This pattern continues to this day.

When I discuss this with students, I tell them that gaining discipline is a series of mind games.  Your mind will find good and effective ways to stop you.  You have to figure out ways around them. The old cliché about when a door closes, go through a window applies here.

I can sense the frustration among you now.  I’m not being specific enough to help.  So let’s go back through my initial points, above, and I’ll tell you how I get around them.  Maybe that will strike a chord.

First, health issues.  I wrote an entire section on this. Find it here.  But in short, here’s what helps me.  I imagine making my excuses to a boss.  If a good boss would let me go home sick or encourage me to stay away from the office, then I stay away from the computer. But if I can put in a day of so-so work, I do.  I store up projects for days when my illness is present, but not so bad that I have to spend the day in bed.  Those are the projects I do when I’m not feeling well.

Second, my annual days off.  I have a few of them—birthday, anniversary, Christmas, and a couple of others.  If I don’t take those days, I’m angry at myself.  Sometimes I take an entire week around it.  That’s just reasonable for any job.  See the section on vacations here.

Third, moving my office.  I haven’t done that for years.  It’s a good excuse not to work, except that I have deadlines, just like you would at a day job.  I had to figure out a way to work while I’m in the middle of this transition.  Because if it’s not this transition, it’s another transition.  Life is full of them, and you have to figure out how to put in your freelance hours, even while everything changes around you.

But those are bigger events.  It’s the small ones that interfere with discipline.  Let’s address what I call the whiney complaints.

First, I would rather read.  It took me an entire summer to figure out that reading, for me, will suck all my time out of every single day.  I cannot start a book with breakfast or I will read until I go to bed.

How did I discover this?  I had a day job that went part-time.  I opted to take the afternoons off. When the job had been full-time, I read during my lunch break.  So I continued this habit on the part-time schedule—and got nothing done.

I tried “disciplining” myself.  I would put the book down and try to go to work, only to find myself reading again.  “Disciplining”—forcing myself to quit—didn’t work.  No matter how hard I tried, I simply could not stop reading, even when I finished the book.  I’d move to the next one.

So the key for me wasn’t quitting reading.  It was not starting.  I set the books aside until I got x-amount of work done each day.

This isn’t easy.  It required actual hiding of the books.  I enlisted my then-husband’s help, making sure the books were out of sight. 

Eventually, I learned that I worked hard and fast if I knew I could read when I was done.  I got my work done, and then I read.  Problem solved.

It sounds so easy, but it took months of trial and error.  No amount of “forcing” myself got me to change my habits.  I had to figure out where the problem started, and nip it in the bud.

Second, I want cake.  (Don’t we all?)  That’s usually a sign to me that I’m hungry.  I need to figure out if I’m really hungry or—catch this—bored with what I’m doing.  If I’m bored, I think I’m hungry, because that’s one of the few things I will get up from my desk to deal with.  If I need a meal, I eat.  But my subconscious loves to trick me (and my hips) by convincing me to leave when I’m not through.

Often, the “I’m hungry” reaction comes when I’m working on something particularly difficult or something I don’t want to do.  Again, it took many months (and too many calories) to figure this one out.  Now, before I get something to eat, I ask myself this:  Do I like what I’m working on?  If the answer is no, I generally stay at my desk.

Note that I do not ask myself if I’m hungry.  I’ve already identified hungry, and the answer would be yes. But I figured out that my subconscious has learned a mind game to convince me to get away from the computer, one that makes me think I’m hungry (or craving food, like cake) and gets me to leave when I don’t need to.

We all have mind games like this, and they’re hard to identify. The question should always be:  Is work going well?  Because if it is, and I’m hungry, I have trouble tearing myself away.  If it isn’t, I’ll make up any damn reason to leave my desk. 

Third, I want to watch the news, download e-mail, look at the internet, do Twitter….in other words, do something else entirely.

This was almost as bad for me as reading was.  I learned to keep my office spare.  My computer has internet access and it also has e-mail access.  I have shut those programs down.  I’ve tossed away all games that were initially on my computer. There is no phone or television in my office.  I have a stereo and a radio turned to a classical channel.  No news of any kind allowed here.

Why?  Because they all distract me.  Rather than “discipline” myself to overcome the temptation, I remove the temptation entirely.  In order to download my e-mail, I have to go to a different computer, one with an existing e-mail program, and download from there.  I need to go to a different room to watch television.  I can’t even hear the phone ring in my office.

These were all tough things to learn.  The internet is particularly sneaky because you feel like you’re working when you’re online.  You are not working—even if, like me, a small part of your business comes through the internet.  You’re not doing your core business.  I have a number of writing friends who refuse to remove the internet from their computer.  Those friends get very little done.  All of them have spouses who work, and so the writer doesn’t have to bring in a lot of money.  All of them frown at me when I suggest removing the internet from their writing computer.

Everyone has these leaks, as the poker players call it.  A leak is something that drains your income, something that has nothing to do with your work. And it’s often something you’re not willing to give up.

You have to learn how to control this leak and make it work for you.  And, here’s the tough part:  If you can’t control it, seek help.  I went into therapy a number of years ago to help with one of my writing issues, something that got in the way of my business.  And much as I hate authority, I listened to that counselor, because being a successful writer meant more to me than the leak.

However, had we worked on my discipline issues with music, I probably would have blown off the therapy within weeks.  I have never had the discipline there, and I really don’t want it.  Not deep down.

And that’s the final issue.  If you want a successful freelance career of any kind, you’ll overcome the things that get in your way.  You can’t do it all at once.  You have to tackle one problem at a time.  But you’re willing to work on those problems.

If you’re not willing to solve the problem after years of trying, then you probably don’t want this freelance career (whatever it is) as much as you think you do.

Discipline is not about forcing yourself to improve.  It’s about wanting to get better.

That’s the difference between Tiger Woods and all those other golfers. Tiger wants to be the best, and he knows the only way to do that is to work harder than everyone else. But he doesn’t define himself as the best right now.  He means the best ever.  He keeps Jack Nicklaus’s stats on his wall, trying to beat them.  Tiger’s not playing the current field.  He’s playing the entire field from the dawn of recorded golf history.

And he’s doing a good job at knocking down the records.

But here’s the key.  He’s not doing this for his wife or his kids.  He’s not doing it for his (late) father or for golf history.  He’s doing it for himself. Because he wants to.  Because that’s his goal.

So…

How do you get disciplined?

Here are a few thoughts.

1. Define what you want to achieve. Not other people’s goals for you.  Not what your parents want or your spouse wants.  What do you want?  And how badly to do you want it?  Will you die disappointed if you don’t achieve it?  Will you feel like a failure?  Or will you shrug and move onto the next thing?

2. Make a list of what gets in the way of that achievement.  If everything you list comes from the outside, then you have another problem.  For example, writers often say they can’t get published because the publishing industry is impossible to crack or they need an agent or they can’t figure out how to submit their work.  Those, my friends, are excuses.  Other people have succeeded in your industry. Figure out how they did it, and then try it yourself.

By “what gets in the way,” I mean what part of you gets in the way. What are you doing to block your success?  How do you change that?  Sometimes the change is minor, like asking yourself whether you are really hungry or you are avoiding work.  Sometimes the change is major, like the one thing I mentioned (deliberately vaguely) that forced me to go to therapy.  I couldn’t change that one on my own—but it was my problem, and I had to find a solution.  I just needed help doing so.

3.  Change your thought patterns.  When you decide to go full-time freelance, realize that your hobby has just become your job. That realization alone will take time.  Then figure out how to make your freelance work a priority (see the section on priorities here) in your own mind.  Apply patterns from your day job to your freelance work.

Ask these questions:

What made you go to your day job every morning?

What made you stay there?

What made you work on days when you felt crummy?

What made you work on days when you had somewhere better to go?

And so on.  Use those answers to design your freelance work.

For example, my husband Dean works hard when he’s under deadline.  He has trouble working when he has no deadlines at all. The key for him is to create deadlines—or to get someone from the outside (an editor, usually) to give him a deadline.

I didn’t think I had that issue until I started the Freelancer’s Guide. Then I realized that I never finish nonfiction unless I have a deadline.  I don’t like writing nonfiction.  I love writing fiction and will do it without a deadline.  But the deadline gets me to finish nonfiction projects—my two columns, some articles, and now this.

By meeting my deadline on this Guide every week, I’ve also established something else.  I’ve got a streak going.  I hate breaking streaks, so that’s motivation to work on weeks like this one, when I could just as easily post a note that the Guide is on a one-week hiatus.

I learned long ago that I have to love what I’m doing to sustain the work.  I loved working at the radio station, but hated it when I was in charge.  So I kept quitting the paying work to go back to volunteering.

I love writing fiction, so I continue to do it, even when times are tough. 

When I need to be disciplined, I have to find the love at the center of what I’m doing.  Here’s an example.  I have tried to maintain a regular exercise program since middle-aged spread hit in my mid-thirties (thanks in part to that hunger thing, above). 

I started with an exercise I love, swimming. But it was inconvenient.  I had to drive half an hour each way to the pool.  The hours were irregular, and I’d often lose too much work time.  So I started riding my bicycle.  I enlisted the help of a friend from the gym.  I had to meet her a designated time every day.  That got me out of the house.

We couldn’t sustain the rides.  Then I fell off the bike and broke my arm, the second serious bike accident in my life.  (The first, when I was nine, smashed my face so badly, I still have occasional dental surgeries to repair the damage.)  I realized that cycling on the Oregon Coast along a highway with no bike lanes (there are none for more than 100 miles) is too dangerous for me.

So I decided to run.  When I made this decision, I couldn’t run for a minute without feeling ill.  I didn’t like it.  I had never liked running.  Worse, I got bored quickly.

But I love music.  If a song that I like comes on the radio, I crank the volume.  If I’m alone in the house, I dance.  So I put my favorite CDs on my iPod, and promised myself I could run for the length of one song.

I couldn’t, not for weeks.  Eventually I managed. But I wasn’t running because I liked running.  I was using that time as an excuse to listen to my favorite music all by myself.

Two years later, I can run for 30 minutes straight.  When I feel like it’s time to find a new form of exercise, I realize it’s time to change the music in my iPod.  I’m bored with what’s there.  I would rather swim, honestly.  I would like to be on my bike. But running works for me now.  And I’ve become so conditioned to it that last week, when my iPod battery died, I played some music in my head and finished the workout. 

Could I do that every time?  Hell, no.  But I know how to make myself go out for a daily run now—and how to enjoy it.  Set the iPod on shuffle and see what songs come up.

It took me fifteen years to find a form of exercise I can do every day, rain or shine, one that I will do.  And what gets me out there now isn’t the exercise or the need for it.

It’s the half an hour of music.  Which I love.

So the most important aspect of discipline isn’t discipline at all.  It’s this:

4.  Find the love.  Find what you love about what you do, and channel that each and every day.  Acknowledge it too. When I finish a run, I check in with myself.  Inevitably, I feel better when I quit than I did when I started.  I’ve told Dean that, and sometimes he’s gotten me outside by reminding me of it.  (I have to tell you, it sometimes pisses me off that I feel better after a run when I felt so crummy before the run.)  Celebrate your achievement, even if that achievement is just getting to your desk.

Celebrate with something you enjoy.

I used to celebrate a day’s writing by reading.  Then I started editing, and reading ceased to be a reward for several years.  In those years, I celebrated with a good movie or a guilty-pleasure TV show.  Now I’m back to celebrating with reading.

Which is what I’m going to do now.

Oh, by the way, I’m no longer groggy from the nap, although I still feel under par.  I did run today, and felt better afterwards (dammit!).  And I got this section of the Guide done, two days early.  I’ll post it late tomorrow, which will be one day early.  Then I’ll get my day off.  With cake.

That’s my reward, along with all the fun things planned for that day.

And that was more than enough to get me into my chair today—even though I didn’t want to be here.

I’m doing the Guide because I have an expertise and I realized about two months ago that the time to share this expertise is now, in the tough economy.  I’m posting the Guide on my blog, figuring that if you like what I’m doing here, you’ll contribute a little bit—as much as you would pay for a book or a one-hour seminar.  Please forward the Guide to other folks who might need it.  Thanks.